Top 100 Franzen's Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Franzen's

#1. A Bereavement? Franzen's posthumous novel?

#2. I enjoyed Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom.' Would I make that into a film? I think it's better suited to television. That would very much be a dialogue and performance piece, and it would take some very skilful direction - but not my kind of directing. But I thought it was a real literary work.

Peter Weir

#3. I think there's a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there's a little minority now that's saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that's just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn't worry about it.

Jonathan Franzen

#4. Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There's no fooling a taste bud, in my experience.

Jonathan Franzen

#5. Among novelists I know, no one is more ambitious than I am.

Jonathan Franzen

#6. In a decadent society people can slowly drift or slowly be drawn by the culture of commerce into yearning for violence. Maybe people have a deep congenital awareness that no civilization lasts forever, that the most peaceful prosperity will someday have to end, or maybe it's just human nature

Jonathan Franzen

#7. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

Jonathan Franzen

#8. It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Jonathan Franzen

#9. It's something to be anxious about," Manley said, "if you want to be anxious about something.

Jonathan Franzen

#10. When I finally gave up any hope of doing anything representative of the American family, I actually seemed to have tapped into other people's weirdness in that way.

Jonathan Franzen

#11. Believe me,' [ ... ] 'I would know about it. That's the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.

Jonathan Franzen

#12. There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.

Jonathan Franzen

#13. Integrity's a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They're pure hyena.

Jonathan Franzen

#14. 's one of the perversities of the age: I'm embarrassed by its success, but I'm happy it's selling.

Jonathan Franzen

#15. Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.

Jonathan Franzen

#16. The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that's indifferent to our wishes - a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance - with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Jonathan Franzen

#17. The guiding principle of Martin's personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he'd sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.

Jonathan Franzen

#18. So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

Jonathan Franzen

#19. She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail,

Jonathan Franzen

#20. Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

Jonathan Franzen

#21. Since a person couldn't exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet's image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person.

Jonathan Franzen

#22. It's like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.

Jonathan Franzen

#23. Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty well licked.

Jonathan Franzen

#24. It's great that a song now costs exactly the same as a pack of gum and lasts exactly the same amount of time before it loses its flavour and you have to spend another buck.

Jonathan Franzen

#25. As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.

Jonathan Franzen

#26. I considered, quite seriously, strangling her to death while I fucked her and then throwing myself in front of the 8:11 bus. The idea was not without its logic and appeal. But there were the bus driver's feelings to consider ...

Jonathan Franzen

#27. Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was.

Jonathan Franzen

#28. Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went to go on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter's version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn't right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

Jonathan Franzen

#29. It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Jonathan Franzen

#30. I hate America," she said. "I thought Obama would change things, but it's still just guns, drones, Guant

Jonathan Franzen

#31. If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

Jonathan Franzen

#32. When a smoker says he wants to quit but can't, what he's really saying is, "I want to quit but I want even more not to suffer the agony of withdrawal." To argue otherwise is to jettison any lingering notion of personal responsibility.

Jonathan Franzen

#33. An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

Jonathan Franzen

#34. It's nice to be able to control my smell environment, and I can hear myself think better when it's quiet. It wasn't easy to become a person who's OK being alone on a Saturday night, but I did the work, I got there...

Jonathan Franzen

#35. There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family's satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children.

Jonathan Franzen

#36. There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it's the right unhappiness.

Jonathan Franzen

#37. I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

Jonathan Franzen

#38. He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. ("Sixty's too bright," he said, "and forty is too dim.

Jonathan Franzen

#39. Sounded to me like he had a pretty good idea what he was saying," Van replied, with surprisingly little anger. "It's a pity he had to overintellectualize like that. He did such good work, and then he had to go and intellectualize it.

Jonathan Franzen

#40. [Patty's] Copernican wish to the be sun around which all things revolved

Jonathan Franzen

#41. If you're interested in how people behave, if you're interested in the way they talk about themselves, the way the conceive of themselves, it's very hard to ignore drugs nowadays, because that is so much part of the conversation.

Jonathan Franzen

#42. I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then ... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

Jonathan Franzen

#43. young gentleman with whom she's been osculating on

Jonathan Franzen

#44. I'm starting to think paradise isn't eternal contentment. It's more like there's something eternal about feeling contented. There's no such thing as eternal life, because you're never going to outrun time, but you can still escape time if you're contented, because then time doesn't matter.

Jonathan Franzen

#45. Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was.
This futility had let's call it a flavor.

Jonathan Franzen

#46. Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person's, and singularities like this are where you find eternity.

Jonathan Franzen

#47. Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

Jonathan Franzen

#48. I was very young, and so I know," my mother said. "I know what can happen." "We're not you," Anabel said. "That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons.

Jonathan Franzen

#49. A child who's got the habit will start reading under the covers with a flashlight," she said. "If the parents are smart, they'll forbid the child to do this, and thereby encourage her. Otherwise she'll find a peer who also has the habit, and the two of them will keep it a secret between them.

Jonathan Franzen

#50. And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

Jonathan Franzen

#51. Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else's expense.

Jonathan Franzen

#52. Hell-o-oh," she called with the silly lilt with which she and Tom announced arrivals. "Hello," Tom called from the living room, without the lilt.

Jonathan Franzen

#53. Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

Jonathan Franzen

#54. I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

Gabrielle Zevin

#55. She'd visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of the place.

Jonathan Franzen

#56. How, by the logic of addiction, could we not have proceeded to the needle and the vein?

Jonathan Franzen

#57. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

Jonathan Franzen

#58. Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.

Jonathan Franzen

#59. There's hardly anybody who doesn't hate somebody now, and nobody at all whom somebody doesn't hate.

Jonathan Franzen

#60. I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.

Jonathan Franzen

#61. Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?"
"I don't know."
"I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Jonathan Franzen

#62. The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

Jonathan Franzen

#63. With whiskey, the capillary bloom was more diffusely rosy than with gin and less purple than with wine. Every university dinner party was a study in blooms.

Jonathan Franzen

#64. The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

Jonathan Franzen

#65. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Jonathan Franzen

#66. Her house was the heavy (but not indefinitely heavy) and sturdy (but not everlasting) God that she'd loved and served and been sustained by.

Jonathan Franzen

#67. There are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

Jonathan Franzen

#68. It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

Jonathan Franzen

#69. I feel that working environmentalists are, in the main, happier than armchair environmentalists.

Jonathan Franzen

#70. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

Jonathan Franzen

#71. As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.

Jonathan Franzen

#72. It's the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

Jonathan Franzen

#73. It was Andreas's gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular

Jonathan Franzen

#74. Whatever else happened, she wanted a dog in her life.

Jonathan Franzen

#75. But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.

Jonathan Franzen

#76. You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me.

Jonathan Franzen

#77. The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there's no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

Jonathan Franzen

#78. You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It's remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I'm the only one who gets to see you on the floor.

Jonathan Franzen

#79. It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

Jonathan Franzen

#80. The cold breeze and the cold of Richard's Camel were mixing like joy and remorse.

Jonathan Franzen

#81. Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
The family was the house's soul.

Jonathan Franzen

#82. The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

Jonathan Franzen

#83. The writer's life is a life of revisions.

Jonathan Franzen

#84. When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.

Jonathan Franzen

#85. It's very liberating for me to realize that I don't have to step up to the plate with a plot that involves the U.N. Security Council.

Jonathan Franzen

#86. You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction - no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy's disgust.

Jonathan Franzen

#87. I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

Candice Accola

#88. Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.

Jonathan Franzen

#89. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I'm never sure which term is appropriate." "Call it all three if you want," Andreas said. "Chutzpah. That's a fourth term.

Jonathan Franzen

#90. It was better to be angry than to be hurt; maybe even better than being loved and held by him, because maybe anger was what she'd been feeling toward him all along, anger disguised as wanting.

Jonathan Franzen

#91. Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

Jonathan Franzen

#92. I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

Jonathan Franzen

#93. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.

Jonathan Franzen

#94. The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?

Jonathan Franzen

#95. Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen